Mark Krajnak

"Maybe I Should Just Shoot You In The Face" has an absolutely awesome, eye-catching title that might scare some folks away from it. If it does, too bad for them. This is a top-notch collection of noir crime fiction written by some of the top modern writers in the field, including Paul Brazill, Chris Leek, Benoit Lelievre, Isaac Kirkman, Brian Panowich, Chuck Regan, Gareth Sparks, and Ryan Sayles. It is a collection that is short and snappy and doesn't take long to read, but maybe that's because it is that good stuff that noir afficiandos just like to snap up. Try and savor these stories if you can, but you will probably end up guzzling it all down in a short period of time, disappointed that there isn't more.

Chris Leek's "Last Exit" is a magnificent piece about a guy who recalls that Kelly had been his one shot at happily ever after and now she was gone and all the new day brings is more dive bars and dead ends. "Omega Man" by Benoit Lelievre sounds like a mid-70's thriller movie, but it is a story about things that are too great too last like Briana and the narrator's campaign to win her back. "Give A Good Day" is Isaac Kirkman's short painful prose about a city where the roadsides are littered with crucifixes and bullet holes and discolored plastic flowers. "Once Upon A Time In The Woods" is Panowich's story about kidnapping and crazy squirrels. Regan's "Taking Flesh" is about the dangerousness of carnivals, teenagers, and photography. Sparks' "Lazarus, Come Forth" is about a gun, a waitress in a strip club, retirement, and Hungarian gangsters. Sayles' "The Roach Motel" is about finding your target as you walk through the hell that comes beyond hell and what you find at a bar filled with ones who are going straight to hell. There is not one story in this set that is not worth reading more than once.… (altro)

This is a short, snappy and sometimes savage collection of neo-noir, although not all of the seven stories truly fall into that category. Some lean more towards the mysterious than the genre’s typically bleak and brutal tales of despair and moral destruction. For instance, ‘Once Upon A Time In The Woods’ mixes urban crime with mystical whimsy in a delightful which caught me completely off guard.

Others, like ‘Give A Good Day’ are not so much complete stories, more like slices of misery taken from the carcass of the human condition and stained on a slide for us to inspect under a microscope. If that sounds just a touch too miserable for you then be assured that not all of these finely-honed episodes conform to that oldest noir convention – the unhappy ending. ‘Last Exit’ at least offers a glimmer of redemption, of a future after the awfulness has ended.

There's more detail about the stories over at:
https://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/maybe-i-should-just-shoot-y...

Of the seven stories, there was only one which I didn’t enjoy; not a bad batting average. However, this anthology didn’t last very long. It’s neatly put together and the different voices are well suited so that they overlap without repeating, but even so it was gone in under two hours. Still, it’s stunning value for less than a quid. You rarely get such high quality entertainment at that kind of price.
8/10
… (altro)